251 days ago I decided to fall back on some of my savings and focus on what I wanted to do for a while – developing my own software ideas. In hindsight, I think I also wanted a break from the stresses and strains of daily agency/contract/freelance development – and to focus on what life meant to me as things change in your early 40s!
Anyway the intention was to give myself some breathing space from client work and focus on building some SAAS software for the beginning of a startup idea within the AI world, since that’s a bit of a paradigm changer.
What I’ve ended up building is a platform that lays the foundation for an AI driven website. Whilst I think websites have taken a battering by social media, and now Google AI search results will start to take traffic away from them even more… websites are still built on open standards and are things that you have control over rather than an American corporation.
I think the technologies that construct websites/webapps are important since they are open-source and not under the remit of corporations which are taking over exponentially. Websites are already incredibly easy to make with GoDaddy, so I am aware that an AI website builder is low hanging fruit, but when you see it as a singular component of an overall business brain which has everything in one place, the website can start to be driven from internal business intelligence. I think that’s where the future is driving to. So the website component is just one part of it, built on a platform. I think the nature of business will change fundamentally as we go more into automation flows … customers will require data in different ways – as proxies through LLMs … and that will impact business workflows.
Anyway I digress.
The app has user auth… simple email/pass. No google/facebook account integration as yet.
Each user can create several brands. Each brand has a website. So for this example I’ve made an Arsenal News website.
It has a dashboard. The statistics are currently 0 because it’s a brand new website.
The system relies on AI workflows. It currently integrates with OpenAI but I imagine moving onto one of the APIs like Replit And currently there are two workflows, Article Rewrite and Webpage Build. These are structured requests so the AI API returns data in a certain structure that I define. For this prompt I have selected an Article Rewrite and defined a simple persona with the following simple prompt:
You are an enthusiastic American Cowboy Arsenal Fan. You write articles with humour – occasionally dark, with witty anecdotes about your long suffering cowgirl wife. You are an amateur sports psychologist.
The system works on Data Sources … with RSS currently the first to be integrated. So I’ve setup a few here and manually synced the feed.
The system lets you manually sync, or set it to automatically check every 15 minutes for updates. In either instances, the articles will be looked at, and processed to markdown.
The system gives you information on the RSS data source.
I want to find just Arsenal information. This stage is still manual but it’s not going to be too difficult to get AI to decide which articles to rewrite based on criteria. So I read through some of the articles to see which might be suitable for rewriting.
You can read through the article.
A notification comes in saying the workflow is underway, and then another one when complete.
The system has sent off some system and user prompts to OpenAI and this has returned an AI Output. Whilst this is somewhat simple, the infrastructure is there to do some much cooler things in the future.
This output has also been created as a webpage, which is accessible in the website manager section.
You can view and edit the article yourself. And assign categories.
The system then hosts a website (in this instance https://arsenal-news.affiliatefactory.ai/) … and puts the article into the website.
There’s the post!
As the weeks go on, I will manage a larger website on it and report on progress.
So what’s the point of it?
As the prototype stands at this point, you could manage an infinite number (constrained by your time) of news websites and you could rewrite articles very quickly once you’ve got the prompts as you want them. If you are a journalist or researcher, you can simply use it as a research tool to keep track of things as well.
The platform has a few tricks up its sleeve and its not vibe-coded, although Cursor helped me an immense amount (with oversight), so the platform codebase is clean and easy to extend.
It’s current feature set is:
- User authentication
- Multi-tenancy (meaning multiple accounts for same user)
- Each account has a subdomain as per its tenant name
- User notifications
- Background work queues and jobs setup (need a bit of optimisation)
- Deployment and monitoring tools setup (third party)
- Admin has site wide search
- Solid form based data system with plenty of nice quality of life features
- OpenAI Integration
- Structured response OpenAI calls
- Post processors configured for AI outputs
- Website frontend template
- Webpage generation from AI API
- Website categorisation and appropriate routing
- Article generation
I am just in the process about figuring out next steps, and will write about them shortly.
Other achievements
- For the first half of the challenge, I managed pretty much to write every day on this blog; and I would post on LinkedIn. That momentum did run out of steam and it became a lot less often. It did give me a glimpse of the power of LinkedIn however, as I saw traffic statistics spike, etc.
- Did some client work for a few months since some work came in that I liked doing, although it ended up a bit stressful, it *might* eventually lead to other things.
- Began my entry into the AI development world.
AI has moved so fast!
AI has moved so quickly in that time – just recently Sora videos have exploded and you can search for them on YouTube but I’ve added an example at bottom of this article. Some of them are hilarious (some wont appreciate the humour but that’s life – you have the right to be offended).
The videos are hyper realistic, some of the 3D rendering is insane as well, and ChatGPT is getting better all the time. In terms of programming, there’s still debate – are software developers in denial or are they right in saying vibe coding ends up with a unmaintainable mess?
ARC AGI-2 remains unsolved
More information on this here
https://arcprize.org/blog/which-ai-reasoning-model-is-best
Right, that’s all for now….
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Sora examples:
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